If you are anything like me, you are getting tired of zucchini. It seems like every day I go into the garden to pick a zucchini. But there is only so many times to eat grilled zucchini or zucchini casserole. You are probably tired of blanching and freezing zucchini for zucchini bread over the Winter. Or you may be sick of dehydrating zucchini into chips.
But my wife was up at an Amish market last week and tasted some zucchini relish. She came home and made me search for a recipe so I could make her some zucchini relish. I searched and came up with several recipes. I ran them by here and settled on this one. Except for the red bell pepper, all the vegetables are from my garden.
Ingredients
- 10 cups zucchini, large seeds removed
- 5 cups onion
- 1 1/2 cups red bell peppers
- 1/2 cup green bell pepper
- 1 jalapeno pepper (optional)
- 1 teaspoon turmeric
- 1 teaspoon dry mustard
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- 1 pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)
- 5 tablespoons kosher salt
- 2 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 1/2 cups white vinegar
My wife isn’t into spicy food, so I was surprised that she told me to put the jalapeno pepper in it. But she had me leave out the cayenne pepper. The original recipe suggested that the combination of the turmeric and dry mustard should be 2 teaspoons total, so I went with 1 teaspoon of each.
Mix it up
First step is to cut everything up. I decided to grate the zucchini. I got my box grater out and went to work. To get the 10 cups of zucchini, I grated the 2 largest zucchini in that ingredients picture. I found that peppers don’t grate very well, so I coarsely chopped the peppers and onions then popped them into the food processor. I over chopped some of them, but I think the majority of them are the proper texture for relish. All the ingredients went into my brew pot. Bring the mix just to a boil. Any longer and the texture won’t be correct.
Relish is done
Ladle the relish into prepared pint jars. Put on the lid and ring. Process in a water bath canner for 15 minutes for these pint jars.
I ended up with 8 pints of relish. My big aluminum stock pot holds 8 pint jars perfectly. I don’t like cooking with aluminum, so the entire function of this pot is as a water bath canner. Actually I had an additional half pint jar, but I didn’t process that. As soon as it cooled enough, I put that into the refrigerator. My wife will eat that first.
Hopefully these turn out to be good. I really need a new way to store zucchini for future use. I’ll report back once we eat some of it and form an opinion.
